Summary: Robust Structure and Motion from Outlines of Smooth
Curved Surfaces
Yasutaka Furukawa (yfurukaw@uiuc.edu)
Amit Sethi (asethi@uiuc.edu)
Jean Ponce (ponce@cs.uiuc.edu)
Beckman Institute, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801
David Kriegman (kriegman@cs.ucsd.edu)
Computer Science & Engineering, Univ. of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093
Abstract: This article addresses the problem of estimating the motion of a camera as
it observes the outline (or apparent contour) of a solid bounded by a smooth surface in
successive image frames. In this context, the surface points that project onto the outline of
an object depend on the viewpoint, and the only true correspondences between two outlines
of the same object are the projections of frontier points where the viewing rays intersect in
the tangent plane of the surface. In turn, the epipolar geometry is easily estimated once
these correspondences have been identified. Given the apparent contours detected in an
image sequence, a robust procedure based on RANSAC and a voting strategy is proposed
to simultaneously estimate the camera configurations and a consistent set of frontier point
projections by enforcing the redundancy of multi-view epipolar geometry. The proposed
approach is, in principle, applicable to orthographic, weak-perspective and affine projection
models. Experiments with nine real image sequences are presented for the orthographic